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44 Man is by nature and vocation a religious being. Coming from God, going toward God, man lives a fully human life only if he freely lives by his bond with God. Source Some time ago I came across an internet Q and A site where someone—possibly facetious—asked if the people living in the Middle Ages knew they were living in the Middle Ages. The answer, surprisingly, is yes, in that Christians of that era identified themselves as living in the mid-times between the first and second comings of Christ. This self-identification created one of the great existential crises of the Middle Ages: a keen sense of termination, personal judgment as well as a sense of universal damnation, particularly in light of wars and plagues that afflicted the later period. Paragraph 44, a summary statement of previous paragraphs, serves as something of a religious positioning instrument for a believer. There is a note of Vatican II’s definition of the Church as a Pilgrim People in this paragraph, in that our origin and destination are both clearly defined and we—individually and collectively—are hoofing it toward a well-defined destiny. The paragraph goes on to define a full human existence as freely embracing the existing bond with God, embracing the journey, if you will, by the markers God has placed along the way. Consciousness of the future is a unique quality of the human species. I learned that very early in my own life when my family would vacation in Pennsylvania with my paternal grandparents. You might remember the famous remark of the political strategist James Carville describing Pennsylvania: “Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, separated by Alabama.” Well, my paternal roots are in the Alabama part, to the extent that when I was very young my grandpa owned his own coal mine. To this day I am bemused by this aspect of my historical make-up; I guess I picked up too many “evil big city ways” somewhere along the line. My family was red state before the term came into existence—but I have no memories of my grandfather refusing his black lung checks from the federal government, either. Anyway, I remember talking to my grandmother on the porch one day about the end of the world. That was a very common Catholic conversation in the 1950’s. She told me that she believed the end of the world would occur in 2000. I did some arithmetic and calculated that I would be 52 at that time— “old” by my outlook, and thus a safe distance away. The event of judgment was hashed over many times in my own household, too. Each of us would stand before all the people in the world who ever lived, and our personal sins would be exposed to all—something like a giant theater screen. At age 8 I found this a bit disturbing and worthy of at least a little attention in terms of daily conduct. Of course eventually I would move to the big city—inside the DC beltway, no less—where I learned two lasting impressions in school about the end times. Our pictures of the end times come in equal parts from apocalyptic portions of the Bible and the literature of Dante. (Dante, incidentally, began writing the Inferno at age 35, which he understood to be the halfway point of a human life. As I am 68, I find his observation disturbing.) My professors would gave agreed with para. 44 that we are moving toward God, but that the moment of summation of the journey is unknown in detail except for the realities of judgment and encounter with God. The second important insight about the end times and its attendant judgment came from my own readings during my years as a theology student. I so regret that I cannot name the source—I believe it was the great European theologian Karl Rahner, but I can’t nail it down—but I recall reading intensely about the act of death. The theological author stated the hypothesis that at the moment of death a man gets to see his life in its totality, in truth, and without gloss, and that this vision is in some fashion self-explaining: the person will know if his totality of life merits his unity with God for all eternity. This final retrospective is “judgment.” I do recall Rahner writing in several places that the act of death begins early in life (which is a biological fact, too) with every one of our actions, deeds, and thoughts contributing to a culminating statement at the moment of death. There is much truth in this vision of death and judgment. I no longer think much about the “end of the world” as a whole because my end is counting down in very realistic numbers, with only the precise quantity of days still unknown to me. Somewhere the end of time stopped being a concept and became a finite number. And with that sense of imminence comes a more intense memory. I do believe that we get wiser as we age, but that wisdom sometimes seems like a curse as I return to various junctures of my life where I chose poorly, acted badly, or did nothing. There are good professionals in theology and mental health who would say that mitigation of guilt is a treatment goal, and Pope Francis’ emphasis upon mercy almost makes one feel guilty about feeling guilty. I certainly don’t repudiate the hopeful elements of forgiveness of sin, but I cannot ignore, either, the experiences of those such as Francis of Assisi, who spent the last years of his life in a cave, lying face down, praying “Depart from me, O Lord, for I am a worm and not a man.” Or consider St. Thomas Aquinas, who in beholding all of his written works, said to his assistant, “It’s all straw.” Para. 44 is a terse reminder of the journey’s end, but it does not say that it is ever too late to begin a true human experience, to freely embrace a life bonded to God. Might be a good thing to start sooner than later, though.
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43 Admittedly, in speaking about God like this, our language is using human modes of expression; nevertheless, it really does attain to God himself, though unable to express him in his infinite simplicity. Likewise, we must recall that "between Creator and creature no similitude can be expressed without implying an even greater dissimilitude"; and that "concerning God, we cannot grasp what he is, but only what he is not, and how other beings stand in relation to him."
When Christianity expanded beyond Palestine and into the wider world of the Mediterranean basin—an expansion described at considerable length in the Acts of the Apostles of St. Luke—it assumed the universal thought patterns of what we would call the Western World. Among the men of letters of the times throughout the Roman Empire the act of thinking and expressing had been inherited by the Greeks. The Greek world itself had gone through something of an evolution by the time of Jesus and St. Paul. Arguably the father of the Grecian mind is Homer, the unknown poet of perhaps a millennium before Christ, whose Iliad and Odyssey are a majestic expression of reality as perceived in his or her time. Homer’s works were moralistic poems of great length apparently interpreting an historical event of great contemporary importance (the Fall of Troy) in a unique idiom. Homer’s treasury lays bare the author’s insights into how humans interpret reality, a “principled dependence upon the fates” (my term) revealed through story-telling. [An aside here: in researching Homer this morning, I kept crossing paths with Homer Simpson, living proof that the evolution of civilization and thought has its peaks and valleys.] Greek thought seemed to progress into its own “Enlightenment” (as our Western world did after the Renaissance) over the centuries as its thinkers searched for more concrete explanations of the human experience. This search expanded into physics (think Pythagorean Theorem), drama, history (Herodotus, Thucydides), mathematics, astronomy. Greeks were becoming thoughtful scientists but were lacking an overall definition of reality to bring this new data together. The revolutionary rumblings of Socrates, who questioned the supposed certainties of his society, prompted the new generation of philosophers—most notably Plato and Aristotle—to address the “organization of truth,” though each would do so in a different manner. Plato’s starting point was the “why” or the ultimate truth. Plato, as you may remember, believed that reality existed in perfect metaphysical forms of which forms of matter, including you and me—are imperfect reflections. Plato’s definition of God, from our vantage point, would be the highest good or the perfect form of the good—separate from individual entities like humans because we are material by nature and thus imperfect. Plato’s method allowed him to create perfect ideas of societies, most notably his Republic. Aristotle, who followed Plato in sequence, worked from the reverse: he was a realist who believed that created things were the clues to the source of reality. His lost work The Topics includes a categorization of animals which gave him a sense of higher and lower forms of complex life. It is easy to see, then, how this philosopher was free to let his mind take him to the existence of the highest form of being, though in his lifetime Aristotle could not take this process further than “First Mover” or “Prime Source” is the ultimate reality. This is the world into which Christianity established itself, and the thinking of Plato and Aristotle would shape the forms and language of Christian life itself. If you read para. 43 closely, there are significant indications of our Greek heritage. As the Catechism explains, believers try to speak of God and to God, though this effort will always be imperfect because we cannot express “his infinite simplicity.” Plato, of course, had no concept of the God of Abraham or the Apostles, but his description of the impossibility of “full communication between equals” (that is, between God and us) is very real and has provided something of a philosophical bedrock for all of Christian spirituality. St. Augustine was profoundly influenced by variant forms of Plato’s thinking prior to his conversion to Christianity, and many would argue that Augustine’s teachings on such matters as sexual activity and monastic austerity (flight from the material world) reflect a continuing influence. It is also important to recall that the major Councils of the Church which defined our Creed were conducted in the Eastern or Greek portion of the Roman Empire, and Platonic influence was in no short supply. What probably kept the Church as a whole from drifting into a Grecian Platonic entity was the very concrete influence of the Synoptic Gospels which emphasized the historical and very material reality of Jesus, and certainly the sacraments, particularly the Eucharist, in which Christians consumed Christ as real food. The material reality of the Church and its rites meant that Church theology could never take on the full agenda of Plato, though many tried in a variety of heresies. Aristotle’s hour in the Christian era would come a millennium later, and by a most peculiar route. Islamic scholars preserved Aristotle’s work through the Dark Ages of the West and these eventually came into the hands of the great medieval fathers and scholars, most notably St. Thomas Aquinas. The Angelic Doctor made use of Aristotle’s writings in several ways. (1) He adopted inductive reasoning, from the specific observations to the general principles; (2) Like Aristotle, he came to the conclusion that knowledge of God was possible from observable factors, such as causality, and (3) he put forth his summary or summa of teachings in propositional form. The present day Catechism of the Church reflects the Greek world’s optimism and pessimism about knowledge and conversation with the divine. Paragraph 43 does leave some interesting points for further reflection. Is the ‘baptized Greek” methodology of St. Thomas, raised to a position of official status in the 1879 encyclical Aeterni Patris by Pope Leo XIII, the only credible way to “do” theology in the Roman Catholic tradition? The Hebrew Scripture reveal multiple modes of contact with God: historical narrative not unlike Homer, the Covenant and the Law, philosophical myth, prophetic wrath, apocalyptic, and wisdom literature, for example. With some possible exceptions in the writings of St. Paul, the New Testament does not expound its teaching in propositional form nor by abstract concept, but in lived history. Perhaps more to our own experience, para. 43 does not close the door on experience and knowledge of God, but simply advises that such experience will be deficient or incomplete. If this is so, how do we distinguish our human contacts with a perfect God, more unlike us than like us, from our limitations as imperfect beings? What is the litmus test for divine communion versus self-delusion? Propositional Church theology can save us from our worst errors, but can it explain and define our best contemplations? If I may quote the old line that there is “no fool like an old fool,” I am in “training” (and I use the word loosely) for a jaunt along the Appalachian Trail later this spring. Today I spent all morning out on a local trail working on my distance and completed close to ten miles all-told, the longest stretch I will do on my “pilgrimage.” After lunch and a necessary trip to Costco, I have reached the end of my energy reserves, so I will do the Catechism entry tomorrow (Friday) and post it on both pages, today’s and tomorrow’s. However, so that you did not waste a trip to the Café, I am passing on a link I was emailed to an interesting essay on American Holy Days from the conservative Catholic publication Crisis Magazine. While Crisis is more traditional than I am, I do enjoy some of the writing, and in this case I found the essay quite informative in its explanation of the process by which we currently celebrate our six Holy Days of Obligation in the U.S. Crisis published this today because six major regions of the United States—New York, Boston, Hartford, Philadelphia, Newark, and Omaha—are celebrating the Feast of the Ascension, a Holy Day of Obligation (i.e., obligatory Mass) today. In my state of Florida, the feast is transferred to next Sunday, the Seventh Sunday of Easter. The author, former dean of the School of Theology at Seton Hall University, believes transferring the feast to Sunday is a mistake. What are your thoughts? |
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